Njob

[Renzatic]

So while I was hanging around on the Polycount forum, doing my usual thing (begging desperately for help), I came across this interesting thread and found Njob.

 

Long story short, it's a free, slightly occasionally flaky, normalmap generator. We've all seen a thousand before, and usually they're middling at best. But I figured I'd give it a roll since it came recommended from another thread. So I go on CGTextures, grab a rather clean ornament texture, and ran it through. No prep work here, this is from the straight photo off the website. These are the results:

 

With photo diffuse

 

Normalmap/heightmap only

 

I mean that's off a damn color diffuse texture, and it came out as good, if not better than, most of my greyscale bumpmap prepped textures. It's so damn clean, too. No high frequency noise whatsoever.

 

For another test, I took one of my old diffuse textures and ran it through. It already had all the shadows cleaned off it, but I wanted to see how it did.

 

 

Not half bad. Not half bad at all. The only downside is the normals come out a little flat, but that's easily fixed in Crazybump. The heightmaps are great right out the gate.

 

I don't know what voodoo magic this guy is using, but it is good voodoo magic.

[STiFU]

Ah nice. I have been searching for a free alternative to crazybump with a 3D Preview (testperiod is running out ). Gonna check it out...

 

Edit: Oh wait, those screenshots are taken in Crazybump, right?

 

Edit2: Oh yeah, damn it!! But that program is indeed pretty good. It's just a little weird though that you convert the diffuse into a heightmap first and then into a normalmap at last.

[Renzatic]

Well, it doesn't have a 3D preview. I'm running the heightmaps through Crazybump and displaying the results. It's a pretty simple program overall. Doesn't even let you scale your textures to fit the window, just displays them full size. But simplicity aside, you can't argue with those results.

 

Here's another texture I ran through it. An old busted mossy wall texture I never got around to finishing. Once again, straight color diffuse, no pretreated heightmapping...

 

Without diffuse

 

With diffuse

 

For a straight run through, that's better than it has any right to be.

 

Very good voodoo magic indeed.

[STiFU]

Hmn I somehow feel the urge to re-revisit my normalmaps...

[Renzatic]

We'll all have an easier time with our new textures at the very least. It seems all you need is relative high contrast between your highs and lows. Not exacting like you usually have to do, but just enough to give njob something to work with.

 

I'm impressed.

[Tels]

Hmn I somehow feel the urge to re-revisit my normalmaps...

 

It is still in time for v1.01

[Serpentine]

I've been playing around for the 30 minutes or so with it, it does a really good job with 'mixed' detail textures, areas of moss and then of brick etc. Looks really good with most brick work. For more organic textures or detailed stuff it seems to get very confused no matter the fiddling. But it does make me feel like a kid in a candy store, trying to figure out what I can do, since its so different from the traditional method. My preview stops updating after a few adjustments which makes life a bit more interesting, it can also get quite slow on large textures. Also just a side note, it doesnt produce perfectly tiling normals, it seems to often have 1px borders of solid colour on the edges.

 

Something quite 'interesting' if you want to get grass/leaf/tilingrock normals to look good is throw them trought creating an ssbump+ao baked in, then using photoshop match colours to a cheap normal (since it uses very exotic colours) of the same texture, you end up with a slightly strange looking normal. But in game it has a very nice characteristic similar to njob but with a lot more detail on things like blades of grass, light bumps etc. On bricks and tiles it looks too detailed to fit in with the other materials however

[Renzatic]

Yeah, after doing a bit more playing, I've come to a similar conclusion. It's not the end all be all texture mapping tool. It has trouble with low contrast textures, much like any normalmap generator, and produces spongy textures if your shades aren't working together just right. But on the plus side, it picks up details with incredible fidelity. I ran some more ornament textures through it, and saw it can pick up and sharpen little bots and bits better than even Crazybump.

 

And yeah, it does lag out and go unresponsive on me for a few seconds when generating 2048x textures. That's a part of the occasional flakiness I mentioned in the first post.

 

But still, it's definitely an amazing little tool that gels excellently with Crazybump if you own it, or works as a good replacement if you don't. It won't change my entire texture mapping workflow, but it'll supplement it quite nicely.

 

Also, the grass stuff. I'm about to do a ton of foliage, so I'll keep that mind. Thanks

[STiFU]

I compose most my normalmaps out of multiple different normalmaps anyway, so another good normalmap generator is always welcome.

[Serpentine]

After playing around a bit more I've started using njob a lot more for converting height->normals, its drag and drop makes life way easier too!

 

The reason for this post was actually to say that disabling "tiling texture" in the options reduces the render time by a _large_ amount. Even when making tiling textures I now leave it disabled until doing the final render. No more fighting the sliders to get the render to update